A fortnight ago, my daughter asked if she and her toy dinosaur (Shiny) could go for a walk “on their own”, promising they’d stay on the path in front of our terrace, not cross any roads, or go around the corner beyond this stretch of houses. My daughter is four. I said yes.
Given the strident nature of parenting opinion, this admission may be met with everything from “that’s nothing” eyerolls to draft emails to Tusla.
I realise there’s some risk involved in letting her out of my sight on a public roadway (however briefly – I mostly linger on my front step where I can see her half the time). On the one hand, she’s immensely sensible, especially about traffic. On the other, it’s riskier than keeping her in the garden or accompanying her. All of which has made me wonder about risk as a principle in parenting and how I’ll manage the risk-reward calculation with her as she gets older.
My daughter adores nature – she’s taken to regaling us with Cousteau-style reports on species of animal she’s invented. Currently, she’s committed to expanding the family of owls far beyond its existing taxonomy to include “sea-owls”, “mountain-owls”, and, more puzzlingly, “owlpeckers”. Shiny the dino is an inch-tall red rubber amputee, and, we learned, a “nectar raptor”. Shiny needs flower-nectar to survive. Until recently both were content to hunt in the garden, but now she wants to go further.
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So I sit in the doorway trying not to run down to her every 45 seconds, to allow her this tiny slice of independence that she finds so thrilling. Stressful though it is, the reward is obvious. I hear delightful snippets of her telling Shiny about the latest flower and what an important dietary source it is. I also see passersby anxiously looking around and relieved when they eventually spot me lurking.
Letting her court risk in these semi-independent mini-walks or allowing her to ride her streamer-adorned, stabiliser-enabled bike in the cycle-lane on the trip home from creche – which we also do – reminds me of projects in Iceland aimed at preventing adolescents getting involved in recreational substance abuse. The Icelandic Model was holistic, involving robust parental commitment and considerable infrastructure. It successfully reduced the ages at which kids tried various substances and transformed the antisocial adolescent behavioural culture.
One of the scheme’s theorists, Harvey Milkman, had done doctoral work on responses to stress and dispositions to react either by numbing (associated with heroin-use) or confronting (associated with amphetamines). Subsequent work examined how people can become addicted to certain changes in brain chemistry associated with risky behaviour, which prompted Milkman to pursue initiatives of replacing bad highs with good highs – or, as I’m conceiving it now, courting good risks to smother bad ones.
This is hard to do in our society. For example, my daughter loves climbing, so last time I was bouldering I asked how old she had to be for me to bring her. Eight, apparently. When I asked the guy why this was so different from England (the London wall took kids from four) he frowned and said “insurance”.
In my childhood (mostly in the 1990s), we operated under the premise that the main risk to our safety was a “man with a van”. I remember this stereotype being so potent that the arrival of a Toyota Hiace to the side of the park elicited suspicion and often a change of location. Of course, the real threat to children was, as ever, closer to home. The following decade, the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) Report told us that, contrary to the stereotype, over 80 per cent of children were abused by people they knew. Turns out the real “stranger danger” was mischaracterisation of the threat.
The conjunction of that fear of the unknown with the rise of cheaper tech meant parents felt safe swapping a lot of unstructured outdoor play for time indoors, often involving screens. However, the screens of the 1990s were very different from today’s screens, which connect children to dangers we barely understand, many of which are not even designed to have malign capacities.
One of my big take-homes from Jonathan Haidt’s writings on “the anxious generation” is that, alongside the notorious increase in screen-time is a nosedive in the riskier, unstructured outdoor play that defined previous generations’ childhoods.
Of course, risk is a comparative notion. We live in a relatively safe suburban estate and my daughter is very cautious (her little brother thus far shows no signs of being afforded the same allowances). So far, the risk-reward trade-off seems obvious. I perceive the risk with the walks to be small, but it’s obviously non-zero. She could do something vastly out of character, safety-wise, or the wrong person could show up at the wrong time (though, I do think it’s important to her ultimate social safety that she comes to know and trust her neighbours in an independent way). Admittedly, these calculations are complex.
However, the reward – supporting her fascination with nature and the outdoors – is one we value very highly. And the calculation is not just about exciting risk versus boring safety, independence versus stifling, it’s also about opportunity cost. I am increasingly terrified of what technology is doing to human attention and cognitive capacities and am clinging to any and all passions she shows for more tangible aspects of reality.
The threat posed by exposure to the online world seems more glaring and troubling every few weeks. I feel desperate to show her an exciting world offline and to try to ignite some passions that will stand to her as she grapples with growing up in the modern world. We need to radically recalculate the idea that a kid is safer behind a closed door inside than out being in the world – and try to summon the courage to act accordingly.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
